Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

SCIENCE

areas of experience at the same time’ (1970:129), such that the scientist never meets objective reality directly and ‘proponents of different paradigms practice their trades in different worlds’ (1970:150).

Most scientific practice is taken up with a fine-tuning of the paradigmatic model of reality, then, and only very occasionally, as anomalies gradually accrue and finally cannot be ignored, is there a crisis, a ‘breakthrough’, a ‘discovery’—and the institutionalization of new paradigmatic theories, methods, standards and norms. At no time, however, is there no conventional paradigm guiding scientific hypothesization, experimentation and validation. And while, conventionally, the scientists’ models are meant to be free-standing—the issue of discovery rather than invention—they are in fact marionettes: puppets which act according to the grace of the paradigm which determined their existence and extent. As Schuetz elaborates (1953:37):

A total harmony has been pre-established between the determined consciousness bestowed upon the puppet and the pre-constituted environment within which it is supposed to act freely, to make rational choices and decisions. This harmony is possible merely because the puppet and its reduced environment are the creation of the scientist. And by keeping to the principles which guided him, the scientist succeeds indeed in discovering within the universe, thus created, the perfect harmony established by himself.

In other words, scientific truth, far from a solemn and severe master, may better be conceived of as a docile and obedient servant. The scientist deceives himself who sees himself stoically dedicated to its search; for he ‘as much decrees as discovers the laws he sets forth, as much designs as discerns the patterns he delineates’ (Goodman 1978:18).

Human beings have a passion for world-making, Goodman elaborates, but we satisfy this passion at different times, for different purposes, in a number of different ways. Science is one such way, religion another. Science predicates itself upon observation, generalization, system, but its truths are nevertheless fabricated, not found: ‘primarily a matter of fit’ with a pre-existing paradigm rather than of correspondence with an objective reality (1978:138). Scientific facts are imbued with scientific theories, in short; facts, indeed, are small theories and theories big facts. Scientific worlds, like all socio-cultural worlds are made; perceiving them consists in producing them, discovering them in drafting them; recognizing them in imposing them.

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A number of well-known ethnographic studies have attempted to elucidate this process of the scientific construction of facts, often focusing their attention upon high-profile and hi-tech laboratories in which cutting-edge research is said to occur (e.g. Traweek 1988; Gusterson 1996). Studying science labs as communities of members intent upon establishing and maintaining their symbolic stature, identity, legitimacy and wealth, within a field of like communities, the broader anthropological agenda has been a querying of the equation between science and rationality (cf. Haraway 1989), and an exploring of science— sciences, better—as cultural productions (cf. Franklin 1995; Marcus 1995). Here is science as identified as tautological discourse, employing criteria for evidence and proof which are internal to itself, unable to validate itself except in terms of narratives which are socio-culturally grounded.

In Laboratory Life (1979), for instance, Latour and Woolgar describe how the daily activities of working scientists lead to the construction of facts in a California neuro-endocrinology laboratory. Neuroendocrinology, as a field of study, originated in the 1940s as a result of the hybridization of the study of the nervous system and the study of the hormonal system. This precipitated a new paradigm or culture, with its own myths, precursors and revolutions, and attempts to isolate, characterize, synthesize (reproduce) and understand the modes of action and interaction of ‘releasing factors’: how the brain controls the hormonal system through releasing peptides comprising amino acids. Members of the California laboratory struggle to deal with a disorderly array of alternative interpretations through the application of frameworks of explanation which cut out most stimuli as noise. By and large, this is a literary exercise, constantly performing operations on literary statements: citing, enhancing, borrowing, modifying, proposing anew. An overview suggests that these scientists are constituting the truth of substances through their artful creativity.

Hundreds of statements are produced in this way in hundreds of laboratories: from scribbled results on paper, to lectures, to pre-prints, to published papers in Nature and Science. And out of the small fraction that survive uncontested and unchanged, Latour and Woolgar suggest, new ‘facts’ are constituted. A new statement joins the stock of taken-for- granted features which are removed from daily scientific activity, incorporated into a large body of old knowledge, and transferred to textbooks. The statement becomes ‘objective reality’:

The result of the construction of a fact is that it appears unconstructed by anyone; the result of rhetorical persuasion

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in the agonistic field is that participants are convinced that they have not been convinced; the result of materialization is that people can swear that material considerations are only minor components of the ‘thought process’; the result of the investments of credibility is that participants can claim that economics and beliefs are in no way related to the solidity of science; as to the circumstances, they simply vanish from accounts.

(Latour and Woolgar 1979:240)

Facts can be seen as consequences of scientific work rather than their cause, and ‘reality’ the outcome of a settling of scientific dispute.

An ancient city of knowledge-practices

In considering science as a way of knowing and a body of knowledge related to a diversity of other ways in a socio-cultural milieu, Geertz adapts a Wittgensteinian image. For Wittgenstein (1978:8):

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight, regular streets and uniform houses.

For Geertz (1983:74), ‘language’ in the above may be replaced by ‘culture’ and equal sense be made. (Wittgenstein is, after all, talking about language-games and forms of life.) Geertz‘s point is that within a socio-cultural milieu, as in a city, people inhabit, frequent and travel between a range of different symbol-systems or knowledge-practices; a socio-cultural milieu is made up of a number of such ways of knowing, thinking, speaking and feeling, each different in terms of its character, longevity, complexity, and the manner, time and extent in which it is used by members. Common sense might represent one such symbolsystem and way of knowing, then, religion a second, art a third, science a fourth, sociology a fifth, computer studies a sixth, and so on. These boroughs or suburbs of the ‘ancient city’ of a culture or society exist in different and developing relations to one another (some expanding, some declining at their expense), and are visited differently by different individual members, perhaps at different times of the members’ lives. Some areas are lived in every day, others only entered for special reasons and the seeking of specialist advice (medical, spiritual, financial).

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SITUATION AND CONTEXT

This Wittgensteinian—Geertzian image is useful here for reflecting phenomenologically upon the way in which scientific thought, language and practice are experienced by individuals at particular times and places. An increasing number of anthropological studies are concerned with this, examining, for instance, the reception of science in the Third World (Goonatilake 1984), the (oracular) deployment of the lie-detector in a Western police force (Rapport 1993b), or the implications of the Human Genome Initiative (Rabinow 1996).

A particularly fruitful area of recent study has been into the representation, dissemination and local understandings of ideas surrounding new reproductive technologies (NRTs) such as in vitro fertilization, surrogacy and genetic counselling (Strathern 1992a; Edwards et al. 1993; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Franklin 1996). How might such scientific advances in the assisting of conception alter people’s sense of the reproductive process, of kinship relations, even of a nature/culture dichotomy and relations between ‘nature and nurture’? How might these senses differ in the contexts of government bureaucracies, medical clinics and family homes?

For example, in the context of the small town of Bacup in northern England, Edwards (2000) explores the extent to which discussions surrounding NRTs and their possible or actual local usage problematizes taken-for-granted ideas of (‘social’ or ‘biological’) relatedness and differentiation, and leads to new cultural practices for the reproduction and differentiation of local identities. New scientific ideas are seen to be appropriated as part of an evolving set, a diverse (and ancient) fund, which individuals variously, and contingently, employ in the continuing business of making present sense. As people consider what being ‘born and Bred in bacup’—among Bacup houses, factories, local services, history, characters, dialect, churches and occupations—now entails, an ethnomethodology may be observed by which local persons and relations are created and recreated afresh.

See also: Classification, Common Sense, Ethnomethodology,

World-Making

SITUATION AND CONTEXT

The concepts of situation and context draw attention to a number of important aspects of social life: its processual nature, its perspectival and plural quality, and the part played in its constitution and reconstitution by individual agency.

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The point is made succinctly by reference to two quotations, the first from Gregory Bateson (1951:238, 212):

The concept of [social] reality is slippery because, always, truth is relative to context, and context is determined by the questions which we ask of events…. [M]an lives by those propositions whose validity is a function of his belief in them.

The second is from Edward Sapir (1956:151):

The true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals, and, on the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each one of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in these interactions.

Taken together, these point up the way in which socio-cultural reality does not exist beyond the interpretations which individuals ongoingly make of it and the extent to which they continue to act upon the assumption of its existence. It has no sui generis existence; it is no thing- in-itself. If individuals stop believing in socio-cultural reality and its institutions, and acting in certain routine ways vis-à-vis the latter, then the reality ceases to exist.

Furthermore, the interpretations of socio-cultural reality made by different individuals can be expected to be diverse, for it is in the nature of individuality that each begins from and operates with a unique perspective upon the world. And since each individual is also a unique ‘energy source’ (Bateson 1972:126), each will be responsible for acting upon these interpretations in an equally unique way. Hence the importance of focusing upon moments of interaction: of the coming together of individuals in conversational and behavioural exchange. For it is here that diverse interpretations and lines of action converge and it is here that processes of social life emerge. Social organization and structure are the result of ongoing processes of negotiation between individuals operating in terms of diverse world-views and agendas. Social organization and structure continue to exist because individuals in interaction maintain the process of their reconstitution, and act on the basis of the outcome of their negotiations.

Another way of saying this is that in situations of interaction, a plurality of individual contexts come into contact, where ‘context’ is understood as the way an individual frames, and distinguishes between, things, people and events in the world. Context refers to the

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environment(s) which an individual inhabits before, during and after situations of interaction with others. These may come to be shared in long-term relationships but it is just as likely (if not more so) that they will remain individual and private.Thus, the same cognitive context may be inhabited by an individual in any number of different situations of interaction, while the seemingly ‘same’ interactional exchange can be cognitively contextualized in any number of different ways.

An awareness of situation and context in anthropology developed out of a reaction against those traditions which sought to reify society and culture (après Durkheim, Marx, Lévi-Strauss), and spoke of structure (also convention, norm, rule, role, system and class) as if possessed of its own life and momentum, and as if objective, coercive, impersonal, coherent and steady-state. An emphasis on situation and context translates as one upon those moments in which socio-cultural reality (realities, better) is ongoingly reconstituted courtesy of the decisions of individuals in interaction, acting often in concert with others but always in the context of their own interpretations and agendas.

Finally, an appreciation of situation and context gives onto a picture of social life as far from neat, settled or singular. For between moments of interaction, and between individuals in the same interactions, the meanings which are construed, and the actions consequent upon those interpretations, may be diverse. Only by a micro-social analysis of situation and context can an understanding emerge of what sociocultural realities are being inhabited when, and by whom (cf. Scheff 1990; Briggs 1992; Rapport 1993a).

See also: Cognition, Conversation, Interaction, Moments of Being

SOCIETY

Throughout the modernist period, a concept of society has underpinned the construction of all social theory, whatever its hue or denomination. If the concept of culture has played the role of queen to all analytic categories of the human sciences, the notion of society has been king. It is the master trope of high modern social thought.As such, it is nowadays considered to be a treacherous friend, a term to be used at one’s risk. As Ingold (1994c:738) has commented, the word now belongs so much to a language of argument that its use signals one contentious claim or the other about the world. We must nevertheless continue to take the term ‘society’ seriously, along with all the other major categories of Western

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sociological thought, such as ‘culture’, ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’, ‘the individual’, ‘hierarchy’ and ‘egalitarianism’.This is because our own ‘ordinary’ ways of cutting up the world of the social will continue to be essential to the ethnographic process for the obvious reason that these categories remain a hidden lens through which we at first see and perhaps later judge the social lives of other peoples. The important transition for the ethnographer to make is to learn to place his or her representations of society on the same level as the ethnographic facts that we claim for other peoples. ‘Society’ and ‘culture’ are categories local to the West which other peoples may or, more than likely, may not share. Good ethnography moves back and forth between the two—ours and their view of the social—through a dialogical process that has as its reward a further unveiling of both. The aim of the dialogue is naturally to deepen our understanding of each. For instance an Amazonian notion of egalitarianism is hardly a mirror image of our own, but we are only able to see this discrepancy by juxtaposing the two. We come to comprehend better our categories of sociality in the process of unravelling theirs. All anthropology includes, with a greater or lesser degree of candour, an ethnography of the West.

The reason for the present-day errant status of the term ‘society’ is that it shares many of the same problems as its sister trope, ‘culture’. It objectifies social life, with the emphasis being upon the systemic aspects of social units and the shared and distinct nature of their institutions and culture.This idea of society as a singular, self-contained, normative, bounded whole that transcends the individual is the notion that is most often cited in contemporary anthropological literature as highly suspect (cf. Strathern 1988; Fardon 1992; Ingold 1994c;Viveiros de Castro 1996; Rapport 1997a). Particularly pernicious for contemporary sensibilities is the abstract notion of society, forthcoming from Durkheimian theory, as the weighty collectivity that imposes on, opposes and constrains all those extra-social individuals who compose it. A prevalent trend in modernist thought does hold to the idea that individuals, like nature, must be mastered, developed and tamed by the greater whole in order for a progressive social order to be reached.The great debate throughout the history of the modern West has been over what this ‘greater whole’ should be, and who should be the object of its taming, but whatever the solution the argument has nearly always been framed in terms of the master trope, ‘society’.

A very brief history of the term’s use

At stake is a theory of human nature and its specific capacities for social life.This narrative of ‘society’ has a historical context, for it was not until

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the eighteenth century that the term began to be used in the modernist, general abstract sense to denote particular ‘social orders’. Raymond Williams notes (1983b:293) that this transformation of use came in the wake of the rise of the nation-state, at which time one prevailing notion of society came to denote the state’s hierarchical and hegemonic institutions of control. The political turmoil of the eighteenth century played its part, for it was through thinking through the questions for a new (bourgeois) political order that the idea of society was constructed in its most general and abstract meaning (ibid.). This sense (e)merged with the notion of ‘civil society’ and the development of contract theories of the state.

In contrast to society as an abstraction, or the idea of society as that to which we all belong in an impersonal, general sense, the earlier meaning pertained to face-to-face relationships within a community, and denoted sociability, companionship, fellowship, or a mode of living (Williams 1983b:291–2). It is this earlier meaning that many anthropologists are now saying is closer to an acceptable view. Thus instead of the term ‘society’, which carries still the modernist meaning of a weighty unified collectivity, many anthropologists today prefer the term ‘sociality’ (e.g. Strathern 1988; Ingold 1994c; Fardon 1995b), one idea being that the social requires individual agency and thus the two partake of one another.

The royal quartet, and the transformation of the normative into the universal

There are many reasons for anthropologists to question fiercely the imagery of society portrayed within the history of the field’s grand narratives of social order. As the above section suggests, our own notion of society, and the elements of which it is comprised, is a product of local historical forces in the West, namely the rise of the nation-state, capitalism, imperialism and the colonialist endeavour. The image of society that came to be favoured in modernist social theory was one that mirrored the major shifts that had occurred in Western social life through these forces of change. Most of our analytic terms that are used for the study of ‘society’ reflect these historically specific transformations and revolutions that occurred in the industrial West, where over time economic life became separated from politics, political life became free of the church, and the domestic unit became detached from them all. Once these areas of life were distinguished as separate domains, it came to be seen as natural that ‘society’ should comprise these four aspects or institutions. In social theory, to understand the order of a society required the study of its distinct systems of economics, politics, religion and

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kinship. What had become normative to the West acquired the status of a universal.

Just think of all those classic monographs in anthropology, and their chapters on kinship, followed by those on economics, and then politics, and finally religion. In Schneider’s critique (1984) of this royal quartet as used in anthropology, he says that each ‘is conceived to be a natural, universal, vital component of society…. It is taken as self-evident that…[kinship]…is distinct from the other institutions, yet also related to them since they all constitute major building blocks out of which all social systems are constructed’ (Schneider 1984:187–8). Anthropologists have argued that among the peoples they most study (the ‘primitives’ of the world) that it is the institution of kinship that is prioritized in their societal ordering, as opposed to politics or economics in our own. It is kinship which serves as the salient idiom for their economic, political and religious life. Nevertheless, the very notion of a ‘kinship-based society’ depends analytically on distinctions that hold between each of the quartet—or, the spheres of society that European culture distinguishes. Basically Schneider is arguing that these four categories of society are local postulates of Western culture, and as such they have little analytical value when applied cross-culturally.

The evolutionary agenda of the anthropological use of the royal quartet

It is important to note the hidden political agenda to retaining our Western categories of societal ordering as universals in the task of understanding the sociality of other peoples. When treated not as local social facts, but as universals, the royal quartet can only serve to reflect distinctions of worth that separate the West from all the rest, and the incisive question can no longer be ‘what is the character of their sociality?’, but only ‘to what degree does their social life approach or depart from our modern Western State?’ The question, even if the overt agenda is functionalist, remains strongly coloured by evolutionism, because it asks: ‘how far has a “society” progressed in its socio-cultural complexity in approximating our own’? Both description and judgement are then structured through the Western standards of normalcy. It was in the West that these spheres of life first detached from one other so that each gained independence from the authority of the next. Such detachment between institutions is understood to be one of the essential keys to progress, and to the development of the complex institutional structures of modern civilization.The category of ‘primitive societies’ means just that: these are societies that are simple. The hidden

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clause, that it is our standards and valuations that deem them primitive, is omitted, and thus by categorical statement they are classified as primitive. They have not developed; they do not have the institutional complexity—and therefore the development of reason—found in the modern West. Their political and economic spheres of life are still embedded in their kinship system. They are consequently primitive by ‘scientific’ standards (which in this case have their origin, it is to be remembered, in the received knowledge of Western folk). The only conclusion that can be forthcoming from using the royal quartet as a gauge for standards, scientific or otherwise, can be that ‘primitives’ are on the low rung of ‘society’. However, complexity is a complex matter, its judgement being dependent upon the eyes of the beholder.

This hidden agenda of primitivism comes in a variety of colours. From its beginnings, anthropological theory has been rife with greatdivide dichotomies to distinguish the primitive society from the civilized. There are the mechanical versus organic solidarities of Durkheim (1964); the cold vs. hot societies of Lévi-Strauss (1966); the pre-technological vs. technological of Gell (1992); the pre-literate/ literate of Goody (1977); the holistic (collectivist) vs. individualistic of Dumont (1977); and the pre-capitalist/capitalist of Marx (1965 [1857– 58]). Such generalizing classifications of difference are often more self- evaluative than enlightening of the practices of the other. Thus, in classifying other people through them, either positively or negatively, one is not only saying, for example, that ‘they have no freedom because they have community’, but also that ‘we shall have no freedom if we value community’, or ‘we can have more freedom if we have productive progress’, or ‘if we had no productive progress we would be immature and uncreative’. Each such dichotomizing tactic is in accordance with the specific Western distinctions of worth that are being evaluatively weighted to create this great divide.

It was complexity in the economic side of life, specifically its technological aspects, that until recently has been a favoured strategy used to unveil the primitive. It is not at all certain that anthropology has totally freed itself from Marx’s assumption that ‘simple technology’ equates with ‘simple minds’ (Marx 1965). The grand evolutionary schemes in anthropology have principally centred attention on technology, the assumption being that technological development has causal weight in the development of the rest of society (even literacy is understood in this capacity as a ‘technology of the intellect’ (Goody 1977)). Thus all hunters and gatherers of the world have been lumped together as sharing a very low level of ‘socio-political’ progress because they only forage for food. Hunters and gatherers, because of their

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